author
Harold Chapman Brown
1879–1943
A philosopher and Stanford teacher with a practical cast of mind, he wrote about science, learning, and the everyday meaning of philosophy. His career also reached beyond the classroom into labor education and public life in California.
1 Audiobook
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
by John Dewey, Boyd Henry Bode, Harold Chapman Brown, Horace Meyer Kallen, George H. Mead, Addison Webster Moore, Henry Waldgrave Stuart, James Hayden Tufts
About the author
Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Harold Chapman Brown studied at Williams College and then Harvard, where he completed a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1905 under Josiah Royce. He began teaching at Columbia University before joining Stanford University in 1914, and he remained associated with Stanford for the rest of his career.
Brown wrote on philosophy, science, and psychology, and his published work includes essays in Creative Intelligence as well as Animal Drive and the Learning Process, written with Edwin B. Holt. Archival and bibliographic records also show a more public-facing side to his work: he was involved in the Palo Alto Teachers Union, the Palo Alto Cooperative Society, and labor education in California.
He died in 1943. What stands out in the surviving records is the range of his interests: rigorous academic philosophy on one hand, and a clear wish to connect ideas with working life and social institutions on the other.